When the sun rises in Yakutsk this morning, about an hour before lunch, it will be minus 38C. Tomorrow it's forecast to be minus 45, which is about as cold as it gets in the inhabited northern hemisphere - cold enough, as Siberians love to tell you, to freeze the moisture on your eyeballs if you forget to blink.

This may be why Siberia got so little play in Bali. With the best will in the world, and all the glacial earnestness of the UN climate change mitigation process, it can be hard to focus on global warming's projected impact on the deep-frozen Russian hinterland when Tuvalu is already slipping beneath the South Pacific. But this is about to change. Between now and the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009 on which the habitability of the planet we bequeath to our children may depend, Siberia will race up the global eco-worry list.

There is little argument about the two main reasons for this. The first was symbolised by the titanium flag planted on the ocean floor 14,000ft under the North Pole by a Russian mini-sub in August - an explicit signal that Moscow intends to take advantage of global warming to drill for gas and oil throughout its Arctic territories and beyond as retreating ice and softening permafrost make them easier to get at. The second is the gas this permafrost releases as it melts. The romantically-named west Siberian bog, bigger than France and Germany combined, contains 70 billion tonnes of methane primed to vent upwards and outwards as it thaws and rots. Since methane is 30 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat, that equates to more than two trillion tonnes of CO2, or two thirds the total amount already in the atmosphere.

No one blames Russia for its bogs. Nor is anyone seriously arguing that Russia should unilaterally forgo its Siberian fossil fuel bonanza (except where offshore deposits are claimed on the spurious basis that the undersea Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of the Russian landmass). What is alarming is the spectacle of the warming process feeding on itself so that even the most pessimistic climate change projections of five years ago could soon look hopelessly conservative.

Background

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Background

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• Al Gore calls for climate ‘mobilisation’

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Background

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Background

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Background

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• Climate change panel verdict: the future is bleak

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Is Russia worried? Yes and no. It was the world's only Permafrost Institute, based in Yakutsk, that alerted the world to bubbling methane “hotspots” in western Siberia and to the region's vertiginous three-degree mean temperature rise in 40 years, which is faster than almost anywhere in the world. But at the same time another Russia - the Russia of Kremlinised (as opposed to nationalised) industrial “champions” and 7 per cent annual growth rates - stands to reap an extraordinary harvest from climate change, and is unsurprisingly unbothered by it.

Thirteen years ago, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire, Walter Russell Mead, the American historian and provocateur, wrote a lengthy, poker-faced appeal to Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton urging Russia to sell Siberia to the US for four trillion dollars. At a stroke, Mead said, the deal would solve Moscow's apparently terminal financial problems and guarantee US energy self-sufficiency for generations to come.

Four years later a Western press trip to Yakutsk produced the first rash of media predictions of entire Siberian cities sinking into the melting permafrost. Four years after that, the World Bank offered grants to coax the jobless indigents of Siberia's stranded outposts to start better, warmer lives near the Black Sea. And in 2003 a scholarly work by two Western academics, titled The Siberian Curse, urged Moscow to reverse the “great errors” of communist planning and “shrink” Russia's physical presence in Siberia back towards Europe and the Urals, creating in western Russia a dense new First World economy and leaving behind only Canadian-style mining camps.

Siberia wasn't sold. Its cities haven't sunk (yet), and their people, by and large, have chosen to stay put. In the meantime, soaring oil prices as well as warmer weather have enabled President Putin's favoured energy barons, and their increasingly cowed foreign partners, to consider drilling in places even Stalin thought too inhospitable or uneconomic to be worth it — among them the Barents Sea and the Far Eastern continental shelf off Sakhalin.

From those barons to whom much has been given, much is expected. For Roman Abramovich the quid pro quo is his continuing multimillion-dollar subsidy of the entire Chukotka province of which he is Governor. (Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly of Yukos, thought Mr Putin's rules did not apply to him and so languishes in jail near the Chinese-Siberian border.)

A thousand miles to the north, the North-West Passage is now free of ice in the middle of summer, bringing the prospect of a 5,000-mile short cut for some inter-ocean shipping, and of floating nuclear power stations to the once destitute reindeer herders of Siberia's Arctic coast. Back in more temperate latitudes, a Berlin-Vladivostok highway is open at last. By next year it may even be paved. Three thousand miles of pipeline are being built to connect the oilfields of eastern and central Siberia to the Pacific Rim, and climatologists believe wheat will be growable to within two degrees latitude of the Arctic Circle within the four decades.

There are potential catches. Yakutsk may yet collapse — though it turns out that many of its structures are tottering less because of melting permafrost than shoddy building. And a warmer Yakutia may prove to be a desert rather than a prairie, since almost no precipitation falls here. But even if it does prove barren, there will be plenty of Siberia left to cultivate. The builders of the labour camps, and those who went east after Stalin's time for extra pay rather than as slaves, were told “not to expect favours from nature but to wrest them from it”. It's a lesson Russia shows no sign of forgetting.

Meanwhile, the best that can be hoped of the west Siberian bog is that its flatulence persuades the rest of us to emit less.

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